does anyone remember laughter?
by jada jasmine
Summary: She had always been able to tell them apart. This was important, she realizes now. George, Angelina, and the impossibilities of moving on.


There's a Muggle saying her Dad always used:

It takes two to tango.

Angelina has always been an impossibly practical girl. Her parents get divorced when she's nine.

For a week she walks around her Muggle school telling all her friends, _Love isn't real. It ends as soon as he starts having fun with one of your best friends, because her mom says it so often on the phone._

Yes, Angelina decides at a very young age there will be no love in her future.

She has always been able to tell them apart.

This is important, she realizes now.

"I hate Bertie Bott's. They aren't worth the risk."

She is eleven, talking to Fred at dinner and he nods very solemnly.

Content, she sips her Pumpkin Juice.

Years later, with kisses and secrets and jokes and fights in between them, he buys her fifteen boxes of Bertie Bott's.

The note reads:

_I think it's time about time to take a risk, Johnson._

God, that had driven her mad and he'd popped his head into the common room looking way too proud of himself.

"Did you like my present?"

"I gave them to Longbottom."

"Life's no fun if you play it safe, mate."

He winked and she tried to ignore him.

An hour later they got caught snogging in the Prefect's bathroom.

Percy was not pleased.

In Muggle Studies one day, they were studying the importance of literature.

It was an American author, which only made the class more disinterested, Fred shooting spit balls into her ear while George made more bullets, the two of them snickering in the back until it rang through her ears.

"The only people for me are the made ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk-"

Professor Burbage never got any farther because George had yelled out I rather like the sound of that and Fred had agreed, chiming in with Why George, I think we're rather the ones for this bloke.

The class had devolved into laughter and it was fifteen points lost for Gryffindor.

She doesn't know why she remembers this.

"Never would've worked," Fred says with a smile on his face.

"Oh really?" because now that he mentions it, she kind of thinks that it could.

(You're so stubborn, he said once when she wouldn't listen to him. She poured her drink on his head and stomped off.)

"Our kids would look terrible with red hair."

His smile's a little sadder, hers a little weaker, but she hits him on the shoulder and walks towards Alicia anyways.

He doesn't invite her to the wedding, but he can never really remember why.

Fleur's cousin turns out to be terribly boring, after all. Figure like a Butterbeer bottle, but no sense of humor.

It's a deal breaker, not having a sense of humor.

At the Battle of Hogwarts, it's him that she sees first. Smile on his face, spell on his lips, and god she wants to keep him alive and whole for as long as possible.

His opponent falls, and he ducks in time to avoid the same fate.

Then there's a beam of green over her head, and an immediate blinding blue ray following it.

"Johnson, try to stay alive eh?"

He yells it from halfway across the room, but she still hears.

_Take that_, Fred, she thinks with a smug satisfaction as she aims a perfectly placed curse at the large Death Eater he's fighting.

Fred shoots her one last smile, and for some reason she panics, feels it clawing up her throat until she manages to finally scream, "Bloody hell, Fred, follow your own advice."

He's around the corner before she finishes.

At the funeral, she sits in the third row. Head bowed, hands clasped tight, and she doesn't shed one tear.

Mrs. Weasley looks tired, too tired, but she pulls Angelina close anyways and murmurs into her ear.

"He always said you were pretty."

Angelina gives her a watery smile and departs immediately.

Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night – heart pounding, head throbbing, a hollowness in her chest where she knows a heart used to be, tears she didn't know she'd been crying dampening the pillow.

She feels a little pathetic, hung up on her high school boyfriend, because she's never been that type of girl.

But she can't help it, because remember that time he kissed her in the Great Hall and everyone whistled? Or when she stuffed a snowball down the front of his pants and he swooned,_ a girl after my own heart_?

Then there was the time that she'd visited him in his shop, and he'd glowed with pride, grin taking over his face and she'd kissed him hard on his smile, let him peel off her skirt slow and how she felt like she was being worshipped, his fingers gentle and his face in awe.

Years later, with a ring on her finger and George in their bed, their children tucked tight between them, she will realize what she was really doing.

She mourned Fred a thousand times over, yes, his temper and his wink and his goddamn stubbornness but she mourned more than that.

It was Puking Pastilles and the Yule Ball and winning the Quidditch Cup and fighting in Dumbledore's Army and – it was her entire blasted childhood, wrapped up in Fred Weasley.

She fucks Lee Jordan once, after.

They run into each other at a bar of all places, her hair in a fancy updo and his out of dreadlocks.

"Ah, if it isn't the woman of my dreams," and his voice makes her think of easier times.

"How about I finally let you buy me a drink?"

In the bedroom, he talks the entire time, always the commentator and she thinks that maybe she could get that feeling back – Quaffle in her hand and wind in her hair, Potter speeding around, George and Fred protecting her, the sound of the crowd when she throws it hard into a goal.

This part that comes next? Let's call it Weasley Love Story, Take Two.

The first time she sees George, he's bent in all the wrong places.

His hands are stuffed in his pockets and he's hunched over his bench, the corners of his mouth turned down. He's slightly off-center, and she thinks that Fred must've always been on the other side to keep them balanced.

She ducks into the shop because she knows Fred would've killed her if she didn't.

Grief is a funny thing. It takes months tearing her up, nights spent at home and mornings unable to get out of bed.

Now it's the only thing keeping George tied so tightly to her, keeping his hands in her hair and her lips on his.

"No one understands," George says on an exhale.

Angelina has brothers herself, results of her Mum's second marriage.

They aren't her twin, aren't ingrained into her every behavior and action like Fred was to George, but they have loved her, cared about her, shaped into the person she is now.

She stops waking up in the middle of night thinking of Fred.

Now it's waking up in the middle of the night to comfort George.

Alicia asks her once, what it's like to love a Weasley twin.

Angelina pauses to think -

_it's laughing at yourself, and hearing a whoopie cushion in the middle of sex, and treading carefully with certain wounds, and breakfast for dinner, and being so wrapped up in someone else their smile makes your heart skip a couple beats._

_It's difficult to explain,_ she says with a shrug and Alicia accepts the answer at face value.

George sleeps on his couch for weeks after, the summer heat making his skin sticky and salty, blankets kicked off onto the floor and long limbs brushing the ground.

Angelina sleeps there with him, for a couple nights, pressed tight against him as if to keep him there with her.

Until she falls off one night, taking him down with her.

The next morning, bruises on their bodies, she marches into the bedroom for bed.

He follows, gaze avoiding the left side of the room and firmly on the curve on Angelina's breast in the moonlight.

It takes him longer than usual to fall asleep. Angelina knows this because she waits with him, keeps his hand in hers as he breathes quick and shallow and just barely in control until it evens out and she knows he's sleeping.

Her gaze drifts over to Fred's side of the room, dust on his shelf and she swallows hard before closing her eyes and drifting off to sleep.

After work one evening, she walks into her apartment and hears an impossibly loud boom.

Her hand is on her wand and her heart pounds in her ears to the beat of notagain notagain and the smoke inside her kitchen makes her eyes tear up.

George is standing there, standing straight and proud and perfect with soot on his skin and a smile that lights up his face.

"Whoops!" He says with a gleeful giggle and for a second Angelina doesn't know if she should laugh or cry so she does a little of both.

"I love you, Angelina Johnson!"

He screams it, loud and sure and she wipes the tears off her face.

"I love you too, George Weasley."

George Weasley and Angelina Johnson get married on a beautiful spring day when they're young.

Alicia Spinnet is the Maid of Honor and Ron Weasley is the Best Man.

People smile and laugh and grin and guffaw and chortle and snicker and chuckle –

It is everything a Weasley wedding should be.

George is nothing but relieved when he finds out Angelina is not having twins.

For a brief moment all he can picture are identical boys wreaking havoc, blowing the lids of pots and sleeping in the same bed and finishing each other's sentences.

It takes the breath out of him for a moment, feels like a punch to the stomach. He feels like he's choking on nothing.

The moment passes; they always do these days.

Relief is still there though; he couldn't watch someone enjoy what he'd lost.

He was never good at sharing, unless it was with Fred.

There's a science to this; the feel of George's hand on the flesh of her hip and her mouth on his collarbone.

A kind of wonder too, the kind of wonder that's been ingrained into their every action since they made it out alive, whole but broken, and sometimes Angelina is most surprised that she still gets to do _this_ of all things.

It seems shallow, but there is something to be said from the feeling of George filling her up until she can't breathe, can't see, can't be contained in her own skin that brings her peace on a whole different level.

"Bloody hell," he says after their first time, the taste of him still on her lips and all she can manage is a throaty, content _mmm-hmmm._

In moments she feels particularly young, when her bones don't ache with Quidditch injuries and war wounds, she can remember with excruciating detail, Fred Weasley.

It will happen at the oddest moments, when she's cleaning her broom perhaps. That one time she was eating a particularly delicious ice cream cone. If a fart joke gets her to laugh.

It will attack her with a driving force; that Fred is gone and she will never feel his hands on her again, that she'll never see the four freckles on his left shoulder blade, that he will never grow old and have kids and fall in love (again).

Angelina doesn't want to name her baby Fred.

It's_ too much_ – too much to live up to, too much to live with, too many feelings that will pressed into her son every time someone says his name.

When he's born, she swears he was laughing.

The name ends up fitting.

There's always that first second when she wakes up, still sleep-drunk and heavy-lidded, when reality escapes her.

Once, in a weaker moment, she had let out a breath and instead she whispered _Fred_.

She froze, fingers squeezed tight in George's grip and prayed to God that he didn't hear her.

The sound was absorbed by the earless hole and she never does it again.

It takes two to tango –

Some days Angelina doesn't even know who she's dancing with.


End file.
